Hasta La Gadget!

Apple’s greatest innovation in recent version of iOS was clearly enabling emoji keyboard support for all iPhone and iPad users, regardless of region. Emojis are fun for everyone, but they could potentially get better thanks to a new Kickstarter project. The TeleSound is an iPhone and Android device accessory that lets users send sound messages, by translating the emojis built into iOS into a corresponding sound and playing it back via a special speaker peripheral.

The TeleSound uses a dedicated app that lets you message your friends, using the emojis provided in iOS. You can line up a series of icons to play back a number of noises in rapid succession, which is likely exactly as irritating as it sounds. The sounds playback via a small speaker that looks like one end of an old-school rotary phone handset, which connects to the iPhone via Bluetooth 4.0 (so it’ll only work with later model devices, like the iPhone 4S and up).

The speaker automatically plays back received messages when on and within pairing range (around 30 ft) of your device, and you can simply flip it over to turn it off thanks to an included tilt sensor. Messages received while the speaker isn’t in range or is inactive will be stored for later playback, so you won’t miss a single duck noise or sparkly tinkling sound. Replaying the last received message is as simple as quickly flipping the speaker over and right-side up again in a single gesture.

Project creators Olivier Mével and Marc Chareyron are the founding team behind a Paris-based hardware startup that previously created reaDIYmates, which are roll-your own kits for building Wi-Fi objects that can provide different responses based on input from web-based applications and sources, as well as smartphones. The duo is interested in helping build the next generation of connected devices to fuel the advent of the so-called “Internet of things.”

The team sought only $25,000 for their first project, and are now looking for four times that amount — $100,000 — to fund the creation of the TeleSound. Pre-orders start at the $34 level, which is cheap, but then again this is just a peripheral that makes it possible for your friends and colleagues to yell at you by sending emoticons over the Internet. Still, it has a certain charm, especially when I think about the potential for freaking out my cat from across the world.

Google’s Chromebook Pixel is aspirational in nearly every way. It’s designed within an inch of its life, a physical specimen worthy of Rodin. Its lines are sharp, its display is crisp. And nearly every review has had the same takeaway: It’s amazing. Don’t buy it. More »

Toshiba has announced a new breakthrough that has to do with embedded hardware for the smartphone and mobile product market. Toshiba has announced the development of a new low-power technology for embedded SRAM. The new technology promises to extend the battery life for smartphones and other devices.

Toshiba says that the new technology is able to reduce active and standby power in temperatures ranging from room temperature to high temperatures using a bit line power calculator and a digitally controllable retention circuit. Toshiba has been able to prototype the new system and confirm significant active and standby power consumption reductions.

At 25°C, the new technology is able to reduce active power consumption by 27% and standby power consumption by 85%. Toshiba has been presenting its new technology at the 2013 International Solid-State Circuit Conference in San Francisco. The company points out that increasing battery life requires lower power consumption in both high performance and low performance modes.

Toshiba says low performance applications require only tens of megahertz to operate and SRAM temperatures remain around room temperature where active and leakage power consumption are comparable. Toshiba says that fact makes reducing active and standby power consumption from room temperature to high temperatures important. The new technology uses the bit line power calculator and the digitally controllable retention circuit together with the BLPC able to predict power consumption of bit lines using replicated bit lines to monitor the frequency of the ring oscillator. The DCRC decreases standby power in the retention circuit by periodically activating itself to update the size of the buffer of the retention driver.

[via Toshiba]

Toshiba develops low-power technology for embedded SRAM for smartphones is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

This week Sony unveiled the essence of the PlayStation 4 with glimpses of both the controller you’ll be using and the new Eye camera that’ll come with it, skipping the part where you actually see the final hardware. But we know the specifications of the actual PlayStation 4 console unit, and we know how we’re going to use it – so what’s the big deal? The big deal is Sony’s complete dismissal of the modern eyes-on presentation that the public expects here in 2013 – without something I can literally hold in my hands, the PlayStation 4 may as well be vaporware.

There are two rather polarized angles being tossed about this week as the Sony show (or no-show) of the PlayStation 4 was let loose. One side says it’s terrible that Sony made a 2+ hour presentation for the PlayStation 4 without actually showing the hardware, relying instead on the controller and a variety of promises from software developers to do all the talking. The other side says awesome! We know the PlayStation 4 is coming now, and we’ve got confirmation from some of the biggest-name developers that they’re on board, so we’re happy!

Here’s what we’ve actually got: a few details about the hardware, info about the PlayStation 4 Eye camera system and the Dualshock 4 controller included. We’ve got a collection of software titles and a few very brief demonstrations of what will be possible on the system. We’ve got Sony’s promise that Everything Everywhere will be their aim with the PlayStation 4 universe – cloud gaming and access for all devices included.

So what else do we need? We’ve got the hype – when your favorite hardware manufacturer creates a new version of the device you love and use every day, you’ll want that new system. We’ve got developer support – just as vital here as it is with a new operating system – perhaps even more so here since this isn’t a smartphone: the PlayStation 4 is made to play games first and foremost. We’ve got a Sony promise that this system will be their next hero system.

Do we really need to see the actual console? The piece of hardware that you’ll end up putting under your television, away from your eye and hidden anyway? This isn’t a smartphone, it’s not a tablet. It’s not a fashion accessory like those mobile devices end up quite often being. This is a video game console – and we don’t need to see it to want it!

PlayStation 4 console: why the box doesn’t matter is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Toronto’s Upverter is a startup that’s poised to effect change that could reshape the landscape of entrepreneurship. That’s not something you can say about most of the businesses we cover on a daily basis, whether or not they have good ideas. But it’s definitely true of Upverter, the company that’s hoping to build a cloud-based hardware engineering platform that can match and overtake its desktop-based counterparts within the next few years.

So what would that mean for the messy, expensive business of hardware prototyping and product creation? Nothing less than the beginning of a new era, according to Upverter CEO and co-founder Zak Homuth.

“The three of us that founded the company all kind of come from a mixed hardware/software background, we all studied electrical engineering, we all worked co-op jobs at startups all around the world, did a little bit of hardware and a little bit of software,” he explained in an interview. “And then we got together to try to improve the rate of innovation with hardware. We all ran away from it, because it was easier to build software than to build hardware, and we wanted to fix that, because we wanted to build hardware personally.”

The idea was to make tools that would allow Homuth and his co-founders to build a hardware company as their next startup venture, so they quit their jobs, sold their possessions to get some working capital and moved to Homuth’s parents basements, with the nascent idea of building an engineering platform that lives entirely in the cloud. For the fledgling startup, the question was whether or not they could build a GitHub for hardware, how cloud-based it could be, and whether that was something anyone even wanted. Flash forward four months.

“Then we got into Y Combinator, picked the company up, moved it down to Mountain View and got this shitty little townhouse across from YC,” he said. “By that time we’d figured out that the solution to the version control problem, the innovation problem, the crowdsourcing problem was to move it all to the cloud, and specifically the tools. Because if you move the tools to the cloud you make it possible to control the file format, so that you can do version control, you can control consumption, you can control the viewer.”

Upverter launched a very simple version to a very controlled group before coming out of YC, and then took that MVP-style product into something that could be used by the general public in September of 2011. “It couldn’t really do much,” Homuth admits. “But it was the line in the sand that allowed us to say ‘Does anybody wanted to do engineering this way, instead of the way you’ve been doing it for 30 years?’ and we got enough ‘yesses’ that we kept working on it.”

The company has since been tracking down money, building out its tools to a point where they actually compete with existing design tools, via a release just a few short months ago. Upverter has raised $650,000 so far from angel investors, including YouTube founding team member Christina Brodbeck, and Xobni co-founder Adam Smith, and that has managed to allow them to build a software tool that begins to be able to compete with existing tools. But there’s still a long way to go, Homuth says.

“It’s not at parity by any means, it can’t do everything that $100,000 software can do yet, but you can do non-zero stuff,” he said. “You can actually get stuff manufactured, you can actually simulate, you can actually manage a product’s life cycle, you can actually design. And that was step one in our three step plan to change engineering.”

Step two is to get the platform to parity with existing tools

Step two is to get the platform to that parity point, where it can compete with existing tools on an equal footing with legacy software. Getting to a point where they can design equally well in a browser as with a desktop tool is around six months away, according to Homuth, at which point Upverter will be able to start building out its sales and marketing team. Once it gets there, Upverter will have built in a little over three years what legacy CAD companies have taken 30 years to create. The next goal, beyond that, is to become the “Rosetta Stone of engineering,” meaning that no matter how you come at engineering, no matter what tools you’re using, it’ll translate and you can work with anyone else in the world on the same files and on the same projects.

Upverter’s ultimate goal is still at least a couple of years away, Homuth says, and the time it takes to get there will be dependent on what kind of money the startup can raise. He’s actively looking for fresh investment now, while also continuing to add to the 10,000-strong user base it has managed to attract so far.

The rise of Upverter means a potential explosion on the horizon for hardware startups, which is why the company is hosting a hardware hackathon with Y Combinator on February 23rd. Making hardware engineering collaborative, affordable and easy to access can have a tremendous impact on the cost of doing business and risks associated with creating new hardware, which is why Upverter achieving its goals could lead to a new revolution for hardware startups, incubators and investors alike.

If you happen to be one of those hardware startups, Upverter is offering free team accounts to TC readers. Just follow this link to sign up.